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- Galafassi, Diego, 1984-
(författare)
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The Transformative Imagination : Re-imagining the world towards sustainability
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A central task for sustainability science in the Anthropocene is to offer guidance on alternative pathways of change. Even though this search and implementation of pathways towards sustainability is likely to require profound social-ecological transformations, little is yet known about the individual and collective capacities needed to support such transformations. This thesis explores the connection between human imagination and sustainability transformations, and introduces the notion of the transformative imagination to support methodological innovation in sustainability sciences, and practices aiming to support transformations towards sustainability. The transformative imagination is suggested to support fundamentally new ways of seeing, feeling, encountering and envisioning the world. The thesis takes a transdisciplinary action-research approach and studies how specific participatory practices, including the arts, may foster the transformative imagination as a means to more skilfully respond to, anticipate and shape social-ecological trajectories in the Anthropocene. The four included papers, each explores how practices may support particular features of the imagination as a transformative capacity. Paper I analyses a case in coastal Kenya where participatory modelling and future scenarios are applied to foster imagination of dynamics of interdependences and trade-offs within the context of poverty alleviation and ecosystems change. Paper II explores system diagrams and scenarios as practices for the development of social-ecological narratives that may support robust interventions in coastal Kenya and Mozambique. Paper III implements, and studies how an art-based approach based on performances, visual methods and an art installation, could support transformative visions of the Iberian Peninsula in the context of extreme climate change. Paper IV is a literature review of the potential contributions of the arts to transformations, in the context of climate change. These papers focus on different features of imagination, which under certain circumstances may progressively develop into societal transformative capacities with the potential to re-structure current social-ecological realities. Overall, this thesis is a step towards forging new kinds of reflexive, imaginative and deliberative practices that can support the emergence of local arrangements of a sustainable world where life can carry on.
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| 3. |
- Merrie, Andrew, 1982-
(författare)
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Global Ocean Futures : Governance of marine fisheries in the Anthropocene
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This PhD thesis provides an analysis of how an adaptive governance approach can be applied to address existing and emerging challenges in global governance with a focus on marine, wild-capture fisheries. All the papers share a coupled social-ecological framing while providing diverse but complementary perspectives. Paper I provides a lens through which it is possible understand the types of interactions that link social and ecological components of fisheries systems at the global scale. The key result of this paper was the development of a marine social-ecological framework to guide future modelling and scenario analysis. Paper II describes the process of emergence and spread of new ideas in marine governance using Marine Spatial Planning as an illustrative case study. The study shows how governance innovations may contribute to resolving the mismatches between the scale of ecological processes and the scale of governance of ecosystems. A key finding of the paper is the identification and explanation of the mechanisms by which informal networks of actors are able to influence the emergence and spread of new governance forms from the local to the global scale. Paper III focuses on governance of ocean areas beyond national jurisdiction. The key finding from this paper is the urgent need for existing and emerging governance institutions to build capacity for responding to the challenges facing governance of marine fisheries. These challenges arise from unexpected shifts in markets, technology and society. Paper IV develops a set of four imaginative but plausible ‘radical’ futures for global fisheries drawing on trends compiled from a diverse evidence base. The four resulting narratives aim to act as lenses for engaging debate and deeper reflection on how non-linear changes in technology and society might radically shift the operating context and core assumptions of fisheries governance in the future. These papers make a novel contribution to Sustainability Science through their focus on 1) the conditions for, and mechanisms of emergence of diverse and divergent governance forms, 2) the role of agency in complex actor settings, 3) the need for governance institutions to not only deal with, but also be able to anticipate surprise, and 4) the development of scenarios of marine social-ecological futures using a creative and rigorous narrative approach.
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| 4. |
- Wangel, Marcus
(författare)
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Deep Roots and Tangled Branches : Bureaucracy and Collaboration in Natural Resource Governance in South India
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This is a study about collaboration within bureaucracies tasked with natural resource management in the contemporary Global South. It seeks to fill a considerable knowledge gap in the extant literature by exploring how individual public officials perceive the policy environment they work in. These individuals face multiple pressures to work more collaboratively yet the ways in which they are incentivised and develop goals and strategies for collaboration have been neglected in past research. A deeper understanding of this process is essential as public officials are largely responsible for implementing policies ensuring the welfare of millions of deprived people in rural areas, and for safeguarding the sustainable use of the natural commons.This book is an institutional analysis of the drivers of collaboration at the individual level. It builds on immersive ethnographic fieldwork on the forest bureaucracy in Kerala, South India where field observations and ninety interviews were conducted with state forest officials. The empirical analysis finds that the majority of officials are in favour of working more collaboratively for a plurality of reasons, but perceive themselves constrained by the formal institutional setup of the forest bureaucracy. To mitigate these limitations forest officials design numerous boundary-spanning, informal networks that function as vehicles of institutionalised coordination and collaboration.Importantly, the officials develop preferences for joint action on policy issues which they perceive the formal organisation is incapable of delivering, not least improved forest livelihoods. These findings are a significant contribution and stand in contrast to most previous related research which has focused on issues of bureaucratic malfeasance in the context of natural resource governance. The findings are also noteworthy as they point to a rich variety of more nuanced roles and abilities individual public officials in India may hold, beyond that of the stereotype corrupt bureaucrat.In addition to the contextualised and vivified empirical description of informal collaboration this study makes two additional contributions. First, it highlights and demonstrates the utility of an ethnographic approach to the study of informal institutions and institutionally constrained behaviour in settings that are little studied and hard to access. Second, it contributes to theoretical discussions on the interplay between formal and informal institutions. In particular this concerns the rationality and necessity of informal strategies when formal institutional frameworks impose constraints on individual agents or lack the capacity to solve complex problems.
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